Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics by Allewaert Monique

Author:Allewaert, Monique
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 10. Wifredo Lam, La jungla, 1943. Lam’s painting of the cane field at night emphasizes the disaggregation of the parahuman body, its entwinement with vegetable forces, and the power that comes from this composition. Copyright Museum of Modern Art, New York / Art Resource.

That the preamble of this first Haitian Constitution detours from the enlightenment humanism of other early nationalisms indicates the possibility of a politics that is aware of the colonial legacy on which human rights depend and opens parahumanity not simply as a personal and identificatory possibility but also as a political possibility. This minoritarian politics and aesthetics that intermittently flashes up from the colonial and postcolonial archive crystallizes in the work of the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Descended from a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother, Lam’s maternal great-grandfather was a free black man who, when he tried to claim property, was punished by having his hand cut from his body and was known afterward as Mano Cortada.60 This history of disaggregation that Lam drew from family history, from his godmother who practiced Santeria, and from observing the continuation of colonial racism in postindependence Cuba, indicates the experience of the body in parts was not simply the experience of slaves but also of free blacks and their Afro-Chinese descendants. The breaking of the body and the concomitant emergence of a series of copresent possibilities and cosmologies structures Lam’s most famous painting, La jungla (Figure 10). Set in the light of cane fields at night, opened scissors in the far right corner indicate the drama of cutting that the painting responds to and spectacularizes. Indexing colonialism’s breaking of bodies into parts such that it is impossible to categorically distinguish between human, animal, and vegetable bodies, the painting does not suggest that redressing the history of colonial brutality requires consolidating the parahuman so that it leads back or forward to the human body and human subjectivity. Arms extend into vegetable life that culminates in almost vibrating human feet. All this without forming any body with determinate contours. Instead, Lam offers an assemblage that proliferates heads, which are at once human, feline, divine, and profane, recalling the possibility expressed in both Obeah stories and in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” that heads separated from bodies anticipate more-than-human collectivities. This more-than-human collectivity presaged by Lam’s painting is not a collectivity that allows an entity to be everything at once. Rather, it iconicizes the body in parts as a dense and nearly oppressive opening through which distinct forms of life are also conjoined and copresent, producing a mode of personhood and politics not grounded on human exceptionalism.

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